The interpretation of God's wrath as a "mental disturbance" (
pathos) bothered Origen (
Homilies on the Psalms 77.5.3, pp. 343-344):
Let someone who is capable of it scrutinize together what is written about the wrath of God in the first book of Supplements and in the second book of Kingdoms, so that he may find what is the wrath of God, which was also recorded in Exodus, that God sent out. No one “sends out” a mental disturbance in his own soul. But if there is any “sent out wrath” it is something of God’s that is not a mental disturbance but, by contrast, something that can be sent out. And you will seek what this wrath is, “sent out wrath,” concerning which it is said by the Apostle to those able to understand: “we are [were -PK] by nature children of wrath like the rest.”12 Accordingly, this wrath, ascending over them, “killed among their fat ones.”13 It did not say that it killed the people or killed many of the people, as some suppose who do not understand “fat ones” and have turned it into “he killed among their multitudes,” but “he killed among their fat ones.”
First, I want to persuade the hearer that the copy that says: “killed among their multitudes” is mistaken. First, because the rest of the editions have no word equivalent to “multitudes,” but have instead, “their sleek ones,” and the Hebrew itself has it so. Moreover, if it had been written “among their multitudes,” it would not be possible for it to be understood with the text “six hundred thousand” went out of the land of Egypt and “three thousand fifty.”14 Clearly, then, if he had killed “among their multitudes,” fewer would have been left. Accordingly, it is not “among their multitudes,” but “among their fat ones,” and he necessarily added “among their fat ones.” Perhaps the people did not sin this sin, “they desired a desire in the desert,”15 but some sinned, either the majority or a minority, while some, perhaps, did not sin. As many, then, as sinned, became fat from the flesh by taking part in the sin. Therefore, it is written, “he killed,” not “among their slender ones,” not “among their thin ones,” but “among their fat ones,” namely those who bore the traces of what they desired in the flesh.
Most versions of the Septuagint (and some Bibles) agree with Origen's text critical conclusion here.
So why did Origen mention the copy that says “killed among their multitudes”?
Origen just mentioned again his dispute with those who see God's wrath as being a "mental disturbance in his own soul."
Origen mentions here that:
It did not say that it killed the people or killed many of the people, as some suppose who do not understand “fat ones” and have turned it into “he killed among their multitudes,”
They "do not understand," according to Origen, and they don't know that "the Hebrew itself has it so."
The way Origen writes about it, he is probably thinking of a written text expounding on the OT god's anger and wrath.
The
Antitheses is a plausible source, then, for these remarks on Psalm 77:31.
Origen also quotes Ephesians 2:3 again in this context, probably a Marcionite proof text.